“RED.”
“Yes?”
“Are you through with that rabble? Can you 'tend to a friend?”
Redfield Pepper Burns wheeled around in his revolving chair and glanced
sharply at Arthur Chester. What he saw made him follow the moment's
inspection with a direct question.
“Sit down. What have you been doing?”
Chester sat down. His face was white. He held up one shaking hand. “Red,
what's the matter with me?”
Burns continued to study the man before him. He made no move to examine
into his condition, just looked steadily into the other's face with a
gaze before which his patient presently shifted uneasily.
“Well, of all the ways to treat a fellow!” He tried to laugh. “Is that
the way you do with the rest of the bunch that come to you every day? Or
are you trying to hypnotize me?”
“Look me in the eye, Ches. What have you been doing?”
“Working like a fiend in that infernal office. If there's any hotter
place--”
“There'll be a hotter one for you right on this earth, if you keep on
the way you're going.”
He rose suddenly, and approaching Chester closely, looked intently into
the uplifted eyes. He sat down again. “Own up!” he commanded bluntly.
“Red,” begged Chester, “quit this sort of thing. Go at me in the usual
way. I--I think I'm a bit nervous tonight. I can't stand your gun-fire.”
“All right. When did you begin?”
“Five weeks ago when you were away. I didn't mean to get into it, Red,
on my word I didn't, after all you've warned me. But it was so beastly
hot--and there was a lot of extra work at the office. My head got to
going it night and day. I--say”--he leaned suddenly forward, has head
on his hands--“I can tell you better if you give me some kind of a
bracer--I feel--so--deadly.”
Burns got up and prepared something in a glass something not
particularly palatable, but when it had taken action, which it promptly
did, Chester's white face had acquired a tinge of colour and he could go
on.
“I stopped in Gardner's office one day when my head was worse than
usual. Had to meet a man in ten minutes--important deal on for the
house--had to be at my best. Told Gardner so. He fixed me.”
“He did--blame him--fixed you for a dope-fiend. I've told you a hundred
times you had precisely the kind of temperament that must avoid that
sort of thing like the gallows.” Burns hit the desk with his fist as he
spoke, with a thump of impatience.
“It seems to set me up for a while--I can do anything. Then afterward--”
“You're getting the afterward all right. How much do you take?”
Chester mentioned the amount of the drug, stating reluctantly that for
the last two days he had been obliged slightly to increase it in order
to get the full effect.
“Of course you have--that's the insidiousness of the devil's stuff. How
soon does it get into action?”
“Oh, right away--almost instantly.”
“What! Is your imagination strong enough to--See here, Ches”--Burns
leaned forward “you're taking the stuff by mouth, of course?”
Chester's eyes went down. “Why--I tried it that way--but it was so
slow.”
Burns ejaculated something under his breath; the quick colour, always
ready to flare under his clear skin, leaped out.
“Gardner gave you a hypo, I suppose?”
“Yes.”
“So you went and bought a syringe and taught yourself the trick. Suppose
you give me a look at it.”
Like a shamed schoolboy Chester unwillingly drew forth the small case
from his pocket. Burns received it. He opened it and took out the tiny
instrument. “It looks like a very good one,” he observed with a sort
of deadly quietness, and with one motion of his big fingers snapped the
glass barrel in two.
At this Chester took fire. “That's going a little too far!” he burst out
in wrath.
“Is it? Thought it was you who had gone too far. It's up to me to bring
you back--while I can. Getting this little fiend out of the way is the
first step. Keep cool, Ches--and I'll try to do the same, though it
makes my blood boil to think how little you've cared for my lectures to
you on this very thing.”
“I have cared. But I had no idea.”
“Well, you have one now. It's taken you five weeks to acquire enough of
a habit to give you some trouble to drop it. You're that sort and
that's the way it works, anyhow. I wonder you came to me to-night. Found
yourself out of the stuff and didn't like to try to get it here where
folks know you?”
“If you want to put everything in the most disagreeable way you
can--yes,” admitted Chester testily.
“That's precisely what I want to do. Put it in such a disagreeable way
that your backbone'll stiffen up a bit and give us something to start
with. If I make you mad all the better--so long as you don't go back
to fools like Gardner, who never hesitate to give a fellow like you a
sample of what that drug'll do for 'em:”
“What are you going to do? I shan't sleep to-night, and I've got to be
in the office to-morrow morning.”
“When's your vacation due?”
“Not till week after next.”
“Arrange to take it now.”
“I can't. Stillinger's off on his, Monday morning.”
“Could you have yours now if he waited?”
“Yes, but I wouldn't ask him.”
“I would.” Burns took down the receiver of his desk telephone.
“Red, stop--I don't want--”
Burns paid no attention to him. In five minutes he had the city
connection and his man. He stated the case: Chester was in urgent need
of taking his vacation without delay, but was not willing to ask the
favour of his office associate. He, Burns, his friend's physician, did
not scruple to ask it if it would not interfere too seriously with Mr.
Stillinger's plans. No diplomat could re quest a favour more courteously
than R. P. Burns, M.D. The reply was the one to be expected of
Stillinger, bachelor and amiable fellow, who was fond of Chester and
hoped it was nothing serious. Tell him to go ahead with his vacation,
Stillinger said, and not to worry over office affairs.
“Now!” Burns wheeled round from the telephone. “Will you put yourself in
my hands?”
“Do you honestly think I'm such an abandoned case--already,” began
Chester unhappily, “that you have to--”
“Listen to me, Ches. I don't think you're an abandoned case--that's
nonsense--after five weeks. But I do think you're well started on a road
that it's ruin to travel. You began it way back last winter by taking
that headache stuff in double the dose I gave you, without consulting
me, every time you felt a trifle below par. That's why I took it
away from you. You felt the loss of it, and you were an easy mark for
Gardner's dope. You've grown so dependent on that already that you're
going to have a fight to get along without it. You can't fight and do
office work, so I'm going to make the most of my chance during this
fortnight's vacation--if you'll give me leave. If you won't--I think
I'll knock you down and get you where I want you that way.”
He smiled--a smile with so much spirit and affection in it that
Chester's eyes filled, to his own astonishment, for up to this point he
had been both hurt and angry. After a moment he said, with his eyes on
the floor, but in a different tone from any he had yet used: “Go ahead,
Red. I'll try to prove I have some stuff in me yet.”
“Of course you have.” Burns's hand was on his friend's shoulder. “That's
what I'm counting on. Prove it by following directions to the letter.
And begin by coming with me for a trip into the country. I have to see a
case before I go to bed, and the air will do your head good.”
It was the first of many similar trips. Arthur Chester may fairly have
been said to spend the succeeding fortnight in the company of the Green
Imp and its driver. From morning till night, and often in the night
itself when he found it impossible to sleep, he was living in the open
air by means of this device. Of walking, also, he did an increasing
amount as his strength grew under the regimen Burns insisted upon. But
for the first week, in spite of all the help his physician could give
him, he found himself indeed involved in a fierce struggle--a struggle
with shaken and unmanageable nerves; with a desperate craving for the
soothing, uplifting effect of the drug to which he was forced to admit
he had become perilously accustomed; with a black depression of spirit
which was worse than anything else he had to combat.
It was at the worst of one of these periods of darkness that, alone with
his patient upon a hilltop where the two had climbed, leaving the
Green Imp at a point where the road had become impossible, Burns said
suddenly:
“Ches, I believe, with all my care to give you the treatment I thought
you needed, I've failed to point out the most potent remedy of all.”
Chester shook his head. “You've done everything, Red. All the trouble's
with me. I'm so pitiably weak--so much weaker than I ever dreamed I
could be. I can't seem to care whether I get out of this or not. All I
want is to lie down and go to sleep--and never wake up.”
The last words came under his breath, but Burns heard them. He showed no
sign of being startled, though this mood was a gloomier one than he had
yet seen his patient succumb to. Instead, he went on talking in a tone
of confidence:
“I ought to have known enough to apply this remedy, because it's one
I've tried myself. If you could know, since the night you heard me
make a certain vow, what a time I've had with myself to keep it, you'd
understand that I know what it means to try to break up a habit.
Mine's the habit of years. With my temper and some of my associations,
intemperate profanity's been the easiest thing in the world to fall
into. When things went wrong, out would come the oaths like water out
of a spring--though that's a false comparison: like the filth out of a
sewer, I'd better say.”
“We all swear more or less,” acknowledged Chester, his head in his
hands.
“Not as I did--and you know it. I've been responsible for many a boy's
taking it up, though I didn't realize it. Because I was athletic and in
for sports with them, they thought I was the whole thing. They laughed
when I got mad and ripped out a lot of language: they copied it. But
I never heard myself as others hear me till that night I let go at the
mother who'd ignorantly murdered her boy by disobeying orders. On the
way home that night I woke up--came to myself--I don't know how. The
stars were unusually bright, and I looked up at them and thought of that
child's soul going back to its Maker.... and then thought of my curses
following it and coming to His ear.”
A silence fell. When Burns broke it, it was in a voice deep with
feeling.
“The next words I sent up to that ear were in a different shape. I
think it was the first real prayer I'd ever said since the little parrot
prayers my mother taught me. That was the first: it hasn't been the
last. I don't suppose I say much that would sound like the preacher's
language, but Ches, what I do believe is that--I get what I ask for.
That's--help to fight my temptations. And profanity isn't the only one
nor the toughest one to down.”
Chester looked up. For a moment he forgot himself and his wretchedness.
“It's hard to believe it's you, Red--talking like this.”
“I know it must be hard, but it ought to be the more convincing on that
account. I belong to a profession of materialists, and all at once it's
grown to seem to me the strangest thing in life that a man who studies
the anatomy of this body of ours should be a materialist. To watch its
workings and then doubt the God who made it is sheet wilful blindness.
But, Ches--I've got my eyes open at last. The God who made me is up
there, and He knows and cares how I go on with the job. As for answering
my appeals for help when I get hard pressed--the biggest sign I have of
that is a human one. Since Bobby Burns came to sleep in that little bed
next mine, it's been a whole lot easier to get on.”
A deep sigh was Chester's reply to this. He had a small boy and girl of
his own. For their sakes and Winifred's he knew he must fight this fight
out and win. But as for getting tangible help from the Creator of a body
handicapped by nerves like his! He began to say this, but Burns broke in
upon him with the answer he would least have expected at a moment like
this--a great, ringing laugh, the sound of which brought the slow blood
to Chester's white face.
“If you consider wrecked nerves like mine a laughing matter--” he broke
out.
But Burns, his laugh over, was sober again and his voice was earnest.
“Arthur Chester, don't make Him responsible for your 'wrecked nerves.'
They weren't wrecked when you were furnished with them. You've done the
wrecking yourself by breaking pretty nearly every law that governs the
workings of the human machine. You're paying the penalty. But you're
going to get the upper hand. From now on, in spite of your office life,
you're going to get good red blood in your veins--and your brains. The
worst is over now--the second week will be easier. But what I'm trying
to tell you is that you'll get that upper hand a lot quicker if”--his
cheek grew hot with this strange, unaccustomed effort at putting things
he had never spoken of before into words--“if you'll just reach up and
take hold of that 'Upper Hand' that, according to my new belief and
experience, is ready to reach down to you. It's stronger than yours:
you'll feel the upward pull.”
He broke off and got to his feet. The two had been sitting on a fallen
log, looking off over the hills toward a distant river winding its blue
length through fields of living green.
“I wasn't exactly cut out for a preacher, Ches,” he added after a
minute. “I hope my talk doesn't sound to you like 'cant.' I'm a pretty
poor specimen of a chap to be setting up my own example for anybody to
follow.”
“I don't think you've been setting up your own example,” Chester
replied. He pulled himself up limply from the log, yet out of his face
had gone the black look which had been there when he came up the hill.
“And what you've said doesn't sound like 'cant' to me, Red. It sounds
more like 'can.'”
Red Pepper Burns held out his hand. His big; warm fingers closed hard
over the thin; cold ones which met them. Then the two men, without more
words, went away down the hill. From this hour Arthur Chester afterward
dated the beginning of the end of the fight.